Remember the days when corrupt public officials fell like dominoes under the gimlet eye of then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie? In the early half of the 2000s, dozens of public officials and politically connected individuals were snared in Christie's net. Later that decade, sting operations produced 29 more arrests of public figures as well as five Orthodox rabbis.

Since then, other than the Bridgegate fiasco and the Sen. Bob Menendez corruption trial, things have been far quieter on the political corruption front.

Howard Birdsall, center, appears in state Superior Court in Toms River in 2013 to face criminal pay-to-play charges.(Photo: file photo)

That may soon change. Attorney General Gurbir Grewal has created an Office of Public Integrity and Accountability, which will be headed by a veteran federal prosecutor with a record of high-profile public corruption convictions. Cracking down on political corruption is one of the main goals of the unit.

One reason Grewal cited for the new unit is the need to fill a void created by recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult for federal prosecutors to win bribery convictions. Conduct once clearly deemed illegal has been redefined as politics as usual. A higher bar has been set for proving a direct relationship between favors granted by politicians and favors received. It was one of those Supreme Court decisions that helped lead to a hung jury in the Menendez corruption trial.

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Attorney General Christopher Porrino holds a press conference after corruption charges were filed against Paterson Mayor Jose "Joey" Torres and three city Department of Public Works employees at the State Police Totowa station on Tuesday.
Danielle Parhizkaran/NorthJersey.com

The greater difficulty of winning convictions is reflected in the declining number of federal public corruption convictions. Although the number of arrests has remained relatively constant over the past two decades, the number of convictions has dropped each of the past five years. In 2016, the last year for which complete numbers are available, federal convictions hit a 14-year low.

In New Jersey, high-profile corruption convictions have tailed off substantially in recent years. The exceptions include Paterson Mayor (and former Jackson business administrator) Joey Torres, Bergen County Assemblyman Robert Schroeder, eight executives from the Birdsall engineering group and former Bloomfield Councilman Elias Chalet.

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Howard Birdsall, the former head of one of New Jersey's oldest and most prestigious engineering firms, was sentenced to four years in prison. STAFF VIDEO BY DOUG HOOD

New Jersey has long had a well-deserved reputation for corruption. There is no reason to believe much has changed in recent days. A 2014 Harvard study, “Corruption in America,” rated New Jersey as one of the two most corrupt states in the nation. It ranked our executive branch No. 2 in “illegal corruption,” behind only Arizona. It also was No. 2, behind only Kentucky, in “legal corruption,” which the study defined as “the political gains in the form of campaign contributions or endorsements by a government official, in exchange for providing specific benefits to private individuals or groups, be it by explicit or implicit understanding.”

Former Paterson Mayor Joey Torres, seated at the defendant's table, wipes tears from his eyes before the judge arrives Tuesday.(Photo: Tariq Zehawi/NorthJersey.com)

New Jersey’s legislative branch was identified as one of just seven in the U.S. in which legal corruption was “extremely common.” And it was in the top third of states where illegal corruption was deemed somewhere between “moderately” and “very common.”

That assessment of our Legislature seems far too generous. So-called legal corruption, or "soft corruption," as it is called in a book by that name by former state Sen. William E. Schluter, may be even more of a problem in New Jersey than "illegal corruption." Rooting it out won't be easy. Schluter's book, which was published about a year before his death this August at age 90, includes 44 recommendations for addressing the problem. Forty-four recommendations. Forty-four ways self-serving politicians can ride the gravy train.

We are thrilled that Grewal has put New Jersey corruption squarely in his office's cross hairs. We would be equally thrilled to see Murphy and the Legislature make the same sort of commitment to rooting out "legal corruption."